NVinNYC

Camino, my browser of choice, just hit version 1.5, which adds a ton of new features including two of my favorites: spell checking and session saving.

I use Safari, FireFox, and NetNewsWire for browsing as well but Camino tops them all with a great combination of speed, features, and nice page rendering. You can get this kind of feature set in both Safari and FireFox by using extensions and plugins but Camino definitely offers the best ‘out-of-box’ experience.

Give it a try!

HandBrake, the venerable DVD transcoding app, which I’ve noted before is one of my favorite utilities, has been unforked from MediaFork with the newest 0.8.5b1 release.

There’s a ton of useful new features and bug fixes but here are the highlights:

• User presets including iPod, AppleTV, and PS3 support
• Anamorphic, even in QuickTime
• Surround sound (both AAC 5.1 and Dolby Pro Logic II)
• Chapter markers (QuickTime-style)

See the full change log in this PDF.

You can download the program for various platforms directly from the project home page. I’m also mirroring the Mac version because their servers are a bit swamped at the moment:

Download HandBrake 0.8.5b1 for Mac from NVinNYC (15 MB).

HandBrake hasn’t been updated in over a year, so an open source community is leveraging it’s open-source nature to develop an offshoot known as MediaFork.

The current version is 0.8.0 Beta 1 and the big things it adds over the last version of HandBrake are a re-skined interface and improved encoders but there’s a bunch more little stuff and some info on future planned features here.

I love HandBrake (I even donated to the developer) so it’s good to see that development will continue and so far it looks very promising. I will say the icon blows chunks, so hopefully that will change in a future release. Not that HandBrake’s was much better, but at least it wasn’t just a circular blob, which is the most prevalent shape of icon it seems.

The site’s getting hammered right now so I’ve mirrored the Universal Binary Mac version (12.8 MB) on NVinNYC for the time being.

(Via TUAW.)